Aston Martin can’t help but wonder

Aston Martin F1 CEO and team principal Andy Cowell admits he sometimes wonders how his team could have performed in 2025 if it hadn’t kept star signing Adrian Newey’s focus firmly on 2026.

After leaving Red Bull, Newey joined Aston at the start of March in his role of Managing Technical Partner, developing the technical side of a heavily expanded team in Silverstone.

In his capacity Newey has been fully focused on Aston Martin delivering the best possible car for the all-new 2026 regulations, which will be a dramatic departure from the current rules cycle and with it a chance for the hyper-ambitious Lawrence Stroll-owned squad to make a big leap forward after a run of disappointing seasons.

Aston Martin has also hired former Ferrari technical director Enrico Cardile, who has recently started in his role after a lengthy gardening leave period, and it will become a works squad for the first time by joining forces with Honda.

But amid all those lofty plans and ambitions, Aston Martin’s current reality is still one of short-term pain, having languished towards the back of the grid until a series of upgrades brought it back into scoring contention.

Speaking exclusively to Autosport, Aston chief Andy Cowell admits he couldn’t stop himself from thinking what the team could have achieved this year by unleashing Newey on the current car.

“I guess in terms of championship points that we’ve managed to accumulate, it’s been disappointing. It’s frustrating,” Cowell said. “It’s one of those years where I stood at the back of the grid at the start of the race and I was thinking: ‘If the 2026 regulations weren’t here, where would we be now? What performance would we have added to this car if, since March, Adrian had been focused on 2025 car development?’

“There’s a dozen other people that have joined in leadership roles and tools that have improved. If all of that had been focused on ’25 car development, where would we be compared with now? Now, our opponents would have improved as well, but I feel like with the horsepower of Adrian and the other equipment that is better than it was six months ago, we would be further up the grid and collecting more points over the second half of the season.”

It’s a tantalising thought exercise, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that letting design guru Newey focus on making a tangible difference in 2026 has been the right strategic decision all along. “That’s not an option, because it’s not just about investing in 2026. It’s investing in performance for the start of 2026 that you then build on over many years, so therefore it is absolutely the right thing to invest in 2026 and beyond,” he adds.

“That is painful when you are stood on the back of a grid and there’s only the medical car behind you, that’s not much fun…”

Lance Stroll, Aston Martin Racing

Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images

Cowell is referring to an outstandingly poor Spa-Francorchamps weekend, where drivers Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll qualified 19th and 20th. But other than Belgium, Aston’s performances did pick up thanks to a redesigned floor in May and another iteration at July’s Silverstone round, with both floor options now in the parts pool depending on the circuit. An improved front wing in Spa ended up paying dividends a week later in Hungary, when the team’s fortunes turned and both drivers qualified on the third row before finishing fifth and seventh.

That upturn in form has at least proven that Aston Martin’s new wind tunnel is working as expected, and that the team is able to put tangible performance gains on the car.

“What we were keen to do with the Imola update was make sure that the new wind tunnel could be used to do the [aero] map at the end of that development journey, but a good chunk of the aerodynamicists was focused on 2026 from the beginning of January,” Cowell explained. “So, it was part of our aero team that did work using the Mercedes tunnel, and then in the last couple of weeks using our own tunnel.

“We were determined to make sure that the update was robust, that in every step of the journey, every viewpoint was that it would make the race car quicker. And it’s pleasing to see that on the Friday at Imola, that unanimous view was still in favour of the update.”

Aston was ready to turn off the tap for 2025 there and then, but some anxiety over whether its Imola package would really be enough to turn around its fortunes then enticed the team to roll out a few more parts. Amid an extremely tight midfield battle, that turned out to be a justified concern, and Aston has since moved up to sixth in the constructors’ table with Williams now just 18 points ahead at the front of the midfield.

“Our original intention was that that was all we would do and that’s the spec for the whole season,” Cowell revealed. “On the way to Imola, you’re nervous that that’s not going to be enough to step you up, so we did do a little bit more development work with a tiny group of people who did some improvements to the floor that we ran in Silverstone, and the front wing that we ran in Spa.

“What we’ve been trying to do is do structured, thorough engineering work, where you have an idea and you work out what every step is along the way. We’re not going to cut corners, and we’re going to work out how to do that in a competitive lead time, but without dropping the quality.

“And I believe that will pay off for every season into the future.”